Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Disable Facebook’s Global Pages for Brands

Do you know what Global Pages are? Global Pages are a Facebook feature on which pages and brands can go International by creating sub pages redirecting the user to it’s region. When searching for a brand, the name you’ll see is the name of the brand, but without you knowing it, you are automatically directed to a page that was created by that brand and is aimed thinking on your language and your location.

Fox example if I search for Hearthstone, I get Hearthstone in the search:

And that’s why I wanted, right? NO. Check out the link:

Since I’m in LatinAmerica, they thing I actually want to go into my region, but I’m not. I want to check out the original site.

If you’re just finding out about this feature and try it out yourself, you may like it, you may hate it, but in any case, there is a workaround we can use to get to the original site without much trouble. Let me clear something up right now, Facebook doesn’t offer a way to disable this from the account settings, privacy settings, or any settings at all. Knowing that, let’s do this.

Go to the site you’re being redirected to: (in my case Hearthstone LA)

This seems like something dumb and useless, but it does a lot for us, the site now shows the original site on it’s name.

And that’s it, click it to be redirected to the original site. A few things to note, BTW:

The site will have a “?brandloc=DISABLE” on it’s URL, don’t remove it or you’ll be redirected to the global site again

Don’t bother Liking it, you’ll only receive the news from the local site, not the original one

Whether doing this or not, every time you do a search, the local site will appear on it instead of the global one

“Well, then, what’s the point of this?” – The point is that most of the time the official sites are the ones that do the contests and giveaways (or at least more), so just keep the site bookmarked and you won’t need to do this every time you want to access an specific site.